Personality Development From Infancy to Adulthood in the Eyes of Freud

Sigmund Freud is a famous neurologist who lived from 1856-1939.He
is most renown for presenting the Psychodynamic Theory of Personality
Development in this theory he discussed the five stages through which a
human being passes from infancy to adulthood. These five stages are
called psychosexual stages and according to Freud each one of these
stages is concerned with efforts of obtaining pleasure centered on one
of different parts of body which are called erogenous zones. The five
stages are:
1. Oral
2. Anal
3. Phallic
4. Latency
5. Genital
I will present a brief introduction of each of these stages.
Oral Stage
As
the name suggests the erogenous zone in this stage is baby's mouth.
Young children are often seen sucking, biting and tend to put things in
their mouth. Freud said that any delaying in the satisfaction of oral
needs like the need of food will result in fixation of the child's
personality at that point and it will produce strong impact on child's
adulthood thoughts and behavior, such as that fixates of oral stage show
personality characteristics of optimism, excessive dependency and
gullibility.
Anal Stage
This stage lasts from 18 to 3 years
of age. The child starts taking muscular control and his erogenous zone
moves to anus. Child attains pleasure by expelling or retaining faeces.
The key here is toilet training, if the parents are strict it may lead
the child to rebel with the result that he will be fixated at this
stage.
Such a person will be overly rigid, orderly and perfectionist as an adult and is referred as an anal retentive.
Phallic Stage
It
starts at the age of about 4 to 5 and is characterized by another shift
of erogenous zone of child, also its the time when Oedipal and Electra
complex occurs in boys and girls respectively. During this stage
children have been observed fondling their genitals. A disturbed phallic
stage of a child will result in disturbance of his relations either
with a single or both genders in adulthood.
Latency Stage
At
the age of 6 a period starts when sexual interests of children are
suppressed this stage is called Latency stage and it lasts till the
start of adolescence.
Genital Stage
At puberty sexual
interests are reawakened and become stronger during genital stage
resulting in heterosexual relations. At this stage many individuals feel
difficulty in developing care and affection for others they may still
feel narcissistic qualities of previous stages of development but as
maturity comes their ability to establish relations also improves and
thus the foundation of adult relations is laid.